Carrello
The mind of Sir Thomas Browne is a world of contrasts. Wonderfully tolerant in an age of extreme intolerances, he declares himself "naturally inclined to that which misguided zeal terms superstition". Anglican though he was, he deals gently with Catholicism, admitting that he "could never hear the Ave Mary bell without an elevation".
At times he might be mistaken for a scholar or deist of the eighteenth century; but the resemblance is superficial. "It is better" he says, "to sit down in a modest ignorance and rest content with the natural blessing of our own reasons than buy the uncertain knowledge of this life with sweat and vexation, which death gives every fool gratis." His habitual themes are the vanity of glory, the nearness of death and human oblivion.
Sometimes he recalls Montaigne by his confessions, sometimes Pascal by the greatness of his cosmic visions. But the insistence with which he places himself in a favourable light awakens regret for Montaigne's spontaneity and less discrect confidences, while literary artifice, a too apparent rhetoric and a taste for the eccentric arc evidence of a less intense and less inexorable seriousness than that of Pascal.